Suddenly about him there gushed the sweetest odours of the Earth—nor were more lovely fragrances ever upon the airs of Valinor, and he stood drinking in the scents with deep delight, and amid the fragrance of [?evening] flowers came the deep odours that many pines loosen upon the midnight airs.

Suddenly afar off down in the dark woods that lay above the valley’s bottom a nightingale sang, and others answered palely afar off, and Nuin well-nigh swooned at the loveliness of that dreaming place, and he knew that he had trespassed upon Murmenalda or the “Vale of Sleep”, where it is ever the time of first quiet dark beneath young stars, and no wind blows.

Now did Nuin descend deeper into the vale, treading softly by reason of some unknown wonder that possessed him, and lo, beneath the trees he saw the warm dusk full of sleeping forms, and some were twined each in the other’s arms, and some lay sleeping gently all alone, and Nuin stood and marvelled, scarce breathing.

Then seized with a sudden fear he turned and stole from that hallowed place, and coming again by the passage through the mountain he sped back to the abode of Tы and coming before that oldest of wizards he said unto him that he was new come from the Eastward Lands, and Tы was little pleased thereat; nor any the more when Nuin made an end of his tale, telling of all he there saw—“and me-thought,” said he, “that all who slumbered there were children, yet was their stature that of the greatest of the Elves.”

Then did Tы fall into fear of Manwл, nay even of Ilъvatar the Lord of All, and he said to Nuin:

Here Gilfanon’s Tale breaks off. The wizard Tы and the Dark Elf Nuin disappeared from the mythology and never appear again, together with the marvellous story of Nuin’s coming upon the forms of the Fathers of Mankind still asleep in the Vale of Murmenalda—though from the nature of the work and the different degrees of attention that my father later gave to its different parts one cannot always distinguish between elements definitively abandoned and elements held in ‘indefinite abeyance’. And unhappy though it is that this tale should have been abandoned, we are nonetheless by no means entirely in the dark as to how the narrative would have proceeded.

I have referred earlier (p. 107, note 3) to the 1existence of two ‘schemes’ or outlines setting out the plan of the Lost Tales; and I have said that one of these is a rйsumй of the Tales as they are extant, while the other is divergent, a project for a revision that was never undertaken. There is no doubt that the former of these, which for the purposes of this chapter I will call ‘B’, was composed when the Lost Tales had reached their furthest point of development, as represented by the latest texts and arrangements given in this book. Now when this outline comes to the matter of Gilfanon’s Tale it becomes at once very much fuller, but then contracts again to cursory references for the tales of Tinъviel, Tъrin, Tuor, and the Necklace of the Dwarves, and once more becomes fuller for the tale of Eдrendel. It is clear, therefore, that B is the preliminary form, according to the method that my father regularly used in those days, of Gilfanon’s Tale, and indeed the part of the tale that was written as a proper narrative is obviously following the outline quite closely, while substantially expanding it.

There is also an extremely rough, though full, outline of the matter of Gilfanon’s Tale which though close to B has things that B does not, and vice versa; this is virtually certainly the predecessor of B, and in this chapter will be called ‘A’.

The second outline referred to above, an unrealized project for the revision of the whole work, introduces features that need not be discussed here; it is sufficient to say that the mariner was now Жlfwine, not Eriol, and that his previous history was changed, but that the general plan of the Tales themselves was largely intact (with several notes to the effect that they needed abridging or recasting). This outline I shall call ‘D’. How much time elapsed between B and D cannot be said, but I think probably not much. It seems possible that this new scheme was associated with the sudden breaking-off of Gilfanon’s Tale. As with B, D suddenly expands to a much fuller account when this point is reached.

Lastly, a much briefer and more cursory outline, which however adds one or two interesting points, also has Жlfwine instead of Eriol; this followed B and preceded D, and is here called ‘C’.

I shall not give all these outlines in extenso, which is unnecessary in view of the amount of overlap between them; on the other hand to combine them all into one would be both inaccurate and confusing. But since A and B are very close they can be readily combined into one; and I follow this account by that of D, with C in so far as it adds anything of note, And since in the matter of Gilfanon’s Tale the outlines are clearly divided into two parts, the Awakening of Men and the history of the Gnomes in the Great Lands, I treat the narrative in each case in these two parts, separately.

There is no need to give the material of the outlines in the opening passage of Gilfanon’s Tale that was actually written, but there are some points of difference between the outlines and the tale to be noted.

A and B call the wizard-king Tъvo, not Tы in C he is not named, and in D he is Tы ‘the fay’, as in the tale. Evil associations of this being appear in A: ‘Melko meets with Tъvo in the halls of Mandos during his enchainment. He teaches Tъvo much black magic.’ This was struck out, and nothing else is said of the matter; but both A and B say that it was after the escape of Melko and the ruin of the Trees that Tъvo entered the world and ‘set up a wizard kingship in the middle lands’.

In A, only, the Elves who remained behind in Palisor1 are said to have been of the people of the Teleri (the later Vanyar). This passage of Gilfanon’s Tale is the first indication we have had that there were any such Elves (see p. 131); and I incline to think that the conception of the Dark Elves (the later Avari) who never undertook the journey from the Waters of Awakening only emerged in the course of the composition of the Lost Tales. But the name Qendi, which here first appears in the early narratives, is used somewhat ambiguously. In the fragment of the written tale, the words ‘those who remained behind are they whom many call the Qendi, the lost fairies of the world,⁵ but ye Elves of Kфr name Ilkorins’ seem an altogether explicit statement that Qendirr="Dark" Elves; but a little later Gilfanon speaks of ‘the Eldar or Qendi’, and in the outline B it is said that ‘a number of the original folk called Qendi (the name Eldar being given by the Gods) remained in Palisor’. These latter statements seem to show equally clearly that Qendi was intended as a term for all Elves.

The contradiction is however only apparent. Qendi was indeed the original name of all the Elves, and Eldar the name given by the Gods and adopted by the Elves of Valinor; those who remained behind preserved the old name Qendi. The early word-list of the Gnomish tongue states explicitly that the name Elda was given to the ‘fairies’ by the Valar and was ‘adopted largely by them; the Ilkorins still preserved the old name Qendi, and this was adopted as the name of the reunited clans in Tol Eressлa’.⁶

In both A and B it is added that ‘the Gods spoke not among themselves the tongues of the Eldaliл, but could do so, and they comprehended all tongues. The wiser of the Elves learned the secret speech of the Gods and long treasured it, but after the coming to Tol Eressлa none remembered it save the Inwir, and now that knowledge has died save in the house of Meril.’ With this compare Rъmil’s remarks to Eriol, p. 48: ‘There is beside the secret tongue in which the Eldar wrote many poesies and books of wisdom and histories of old and earliest things, and yet speak not. This tongue do only the Valar use in their high counsels, and not many of the Eldar of these days may read it or solve its characters.’